- Hi, I'm William Lidwell,…and this is Universal Principles of Design.…In this movie, Figure-Ground:…How to Get Two Things for the Price of One.…At some point in your life, you've probably…seen an image known as a Rubin vase.…The idea behind a Rubin vase…is that it demonstrates the way…in which the brain makes sense of the world.…Or, rather, tries to make sense of the world.…The Rubin vase is what's known as a "bi-stable image."…Meaning it creates two different stable perceptions:…one of a vase, and one of a pair of faces.…
But the perceptions can only exist one at a time.…In other words, we can see a vase…or the two faces, but not both at once.…So your brain switches back-and-forth.…A modern example of how this effect…can be used in design is the FedEx logo.…Many people are familiar with the logo,…but not everyone sees, at least not consciously,…the white arrow created by the negative…space between the E and the x.…See it?…It's one of those things that,…once you see, you can't un-see.…
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein…
Updated
7/19/2017Released
7/15/2015Skill Level Intermediate
Duration
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Introduction
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Welcome48s
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Previous Episodes
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Flexibility Trade-Offs5m 32s
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Alignment4m 18s
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Feature Creep4m 36s
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Desire Lines4m 50s
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Top-Down Lighting Bias4m 54s
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Iteration3m 49s
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Garbage in, garbage out4m 6s
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Hick’s law5m 26s
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KISS3m 54s
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Left-digit effect2m 58s
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Root cause5m 14s
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Sunk-cost effect5m 35s
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Selection bias4m 42s
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IKEA effect4m 11s
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Red effects5m 56s
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Black effects5m 12s
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White effects4m 50s
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Weakest link4m 5s
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Supernormal stimuli5m 22s
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Performance Load5m 26s
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Forgiveness4m 15s
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Figure ground4m 47s
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Crowd intelligence4m 25s
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Errors5m 33s
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Aesthetic-usability effect3m 21s
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The 80/20 rule4m 38s
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Baby-face bias5m 7s
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Cognitive dissonance5m 20s
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Consistency5m 29s
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Design by committee5m 47s
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Expectation effects5m 59s
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Factors of safety6m 41s
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Gloss bias4m 40s
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Golden ratio6m 29s
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MAFA4m 17s
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Archetypes4m 48s
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Face-ism Ratio5m 34s
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Five Hat Racks5m 26s
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Flow4m 38s
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Freeze-Flight-Fight-Forfeit4m 52s
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Legibility4m 46s
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MAYA4m 20s
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Mental Models6m 34s
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Modularity5m 19s
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Orientation Sensitivity5m 5s
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Redundancy5m 36s
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Satisficing4m 14s
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Scaling fallacy5m 38s
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Shaping5m 14s
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Storytelling5m 58s
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Waist-to-hip ratio5m 15s
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Zeigarnik effect4m 28s
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Affordances7m 59s
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Blue effects8m 17s
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Feedback loops7m 8s
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Five tenets of queuing6m 7s
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Green effects7m 21s
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Nudge7m 46s
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Paradox of unanimity6m 39s
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Progressive subtraction5m 50s
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Savanna preference4m 36s
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Yellow effects7m 41s
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Video: Figure ground